Intention involves such a small fragment of our consciousness and of our mind and of our life.

I often find that having an idea in my head prevents me from doing something else. Working is therefore a way of getting rid of an idea.

The thing is, if you believe in the unconscious - and I do - there's room for all kinds of possibilities that I don't know how you prove one way or another.

Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that.

I think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement.

I tend to like things that already exist.

I am just trying to find a way to make pictures.

To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.

Everyone is of course free to interpret the work in his own way. I think seeing a picture is one thing and interpreting it is another.

When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive.

In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in.

I never wish for critics.

I don't know how to organise thoughts. I don't know how to have thoughts.

Intention involves such a small fragment of our consciousness and of our mind and of our life.

Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.

As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken. Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a freedom or a confusion.

One works without thinking how to work.

I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

One likes to think that one anticipates changes in the spaces we inhabit, and our ideas about space.

Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me.

At first I had some idea that the absence of color made the work more physical. Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.

I am not strong on perfection.

I decided that if my work contained what I could identify as a likeness to other work, I would remove it.'

I don't want my work to be an exposure of my feelings.

I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn't aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.

My experience of life is that it's very fragmented; certain kinds of things happen, and in another place, a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences.

Sometime during the mid-50s I said, 'I am an artist.' Before that, for many years, I had said, 'I'm going to be an artist.' Then I went through a change of mind and a change of heart. What made 'going to be an artist' into 'being an artist', was, in part, a spiritual change.

Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.

The only logical thing I can think of is that I knew there were such things as artists, and I knew there were none where I lived. So I knew that to be an artist you had to be somewhere else. And I very much wanted to be somewhere else.

There was very little art in my childhood. I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn't aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.

This image of wanting to be an artist - that I would in some way become an artist -was very strong. I knew for a long, long time that that's what I would be. But nothing I ever did seemed to bring me any nearer to the condition of being an artist. And I didn't know how to do it.

To me, self-description is a calamity.

The essential elements of giving are power and love - activity and affection - and the consciousness of the race testifies that in the high and appropriate exercise of these is a blessedness greater than any other.

What's fascinating is that when you write a script, it's almost a stream of consciousness. You have an idea that it means something, but you're not always sure what. Then when you get on the set, the actors teach you.

A young man is stirred and stimulated by the consciousness of how much depends upon his own exertions: a young girl is oppressed by it.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

Life is a state of consciousness.

I've always been interested in the relationship between total external surround, culture, the political matrix, technology, etc., and the internal human consciousness.

There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory).

A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.

There is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first consciousness of love, the first fluttering of its silken wings.

You shall always find what you created in your mind, for instance, a benevolent God or an evil Devil. Between them are countless facets. Therefore, concentrate on the depth of your consciousness and on what you consider to be positive and good.

Feeling is the consciousness of the resulting conditions - of success, failure, equilibrium, compromise or balance, in this continuous rivalry of ideas.

Only those within whose own consciousness the sun rise and set, the leaves burgeon and wither, can be said to be aware of what living is.

Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.

The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy.

Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.

And if I can take part in it by transforming my own consciousness, then someone else's, I'm happy to do it.